Media Week's Meet the Client feature, which profiles a different advertiser and its brands each week, regularly shows this is also the case client-side (see page 17). Sure, the money is good in media - and so are the perks. But it's the people who get you through the day and bring real enjoyment to the job.
It's why it is so important that the commercial media industry makes strenuous efforts to market itself and attract as many of the best individuals from each generation into the business.
And with each generation comes a different culture and take on the way things are done. What might have been second nature and received wisdom for those brave hearts who built and established the industry in the '80s and '90s, is fundamentally questioned by each subsequent generation.
This was brought into focus by Channel 4 and Media Week's recent Plannertarium initiative, which gathered together some of the brightest young operators from the planning community with gurus of the commercial TV world to discuss the big issues of the day and come up with some better ways of working (see page 27).
The debate was feisty and there was a genuine desire for TV planning to operate in a different way. The old ways of dealing in stark number-crunching to the exclusion of all else will be a thing of the past if this generation has its way.
The new breed of media professionals have clear and forthright views on the way things should be done. That may frighten some traditionalists, but actually it's exactly the way things should be. Without this young blood regenerating the media industry, the sector will simply stagnate. It's one bellwether that's definitely worth taking notice of.
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